Stories from the Kingdom of Klah

Popplesnik Peak (here seen from the south face) attracts many tourists each year as it is widely believed that if you mount the summit on the full moon whilst carrying 3 small shopping bags of blue lizards, you will be blessed with magnificent hair for thirty-one subsequent moons.

 Three days ago I went inside a really long snake under the sea and when I emerged I was in yet another foreign land, the land of Engle. It was cold in the reptile, and strange, I had thoughts of Geppetto, but no sooner had a darkness begun to press in on my thoughts, I was expelled, awkwardly, but alive, and with less snake innards on my sweater than expected.

Paul had been playing the piano for quite some time now, but he had no idea if he was any good. He knew that sometimes people could be deluded about their talents, but how did one know if that were so - for he had also heard of the dreaded Low Self Esteem that could plague creative geniuses.

He tried to look for signs and noticed that birds always flew away when he started playing, but then again they could just be jealous of his perfect rhythm and spectacular melodies, or perhaps the tune of his music tended to remind them of appointments they were late for.

He wheeled his piano to the beach and put on a concert for a colony of seals and they clapped, but then they clapped at drifting seaweed and bucket sandcastles, neither of which in Paul’s opinion had any artistic merit.

Paul suffered many sleepless nights and frittered away many gloriously sunny days tossing and turning in his lair before he realized there was only one thing he was sure of, and that was that when he played, his heart and fur and soul and toe-claws all sang along too, and he may as well continue his public performances until either someone invited him onto Klah Idol or threw a fish pie in his face.

Captain Lilith, the well known seafaring celebrity + pirate heroine was recently awarded the prestigious Queens Award for Piratical Services to the Kingdom, in recognition of her brave and fearless capture of 72 Magnet-Fingered, Saw-Toothed Pirate Squid. The crew of mischievous squid have been terrorising the seas of Klah for many years by slithering under ships and using their magnet fingers to draw out metal chests of treasure, expensive iron frying pans, electric guitars, several thousand sets of tweezers and passengers with too many fillings. All this bounty is drawn out through holes they have nibbled in the hull of the boat using their saw teeth, and thus the boat normally sinks without so much as a good deck brawl.

“Terrible pirating practice” says Captain Lilith. “It’s cheating, and not in an acceptable piratical fashion either. The scallywags were difficult to catch – every time I got near, my cutlass was whipped out of my hands and my canons malfunctioned. In the end I used a pandemonium of parrots, assisted by monkeys riding on their backs to drop a metallic net on the scoundrels. That snaffled them jolly good.”